


The legacy of our trying

by Crazycatlady89



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 03:35:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9529916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazycatlady89/pseuds/Crazycatlady89





	

Asami sat in her father’s office.  
It was late afternoon which meant that by any normal standards the young girl should be at home playing or being tutored on her reading.  
Perhaps she even ought to be eating a home cooked meal prepared by a loving parent.  
Asami did not eat home cooked meals, not for the lack of a loving parent. But rather because her father; the only relative she had to her name, was not much of a cook and far too busy to do any sort of household task that wasn’t strictly necessary.

Hiroshi Sato’s office was very much crammed with knick knacks and stacks of paper and all the paraphernalia of inventive genius. There was the dusty smell of old books, thick rugs as well as the waxy musk of well loved wooden furniture that made the place feel so very much like home. 

The five year old girl had a stack of old papers in front of her and an industrial strength hole puncher between her legs.  
She kept overloading the machine in her childlike eagerness to achieve a pointless task all the quicker, she would then called out to Hiroshi to help her push it down. Every time the five year old cried “Daddy, daddy it won’t go down!” the moustached man set aside his work and rose to give the puncher a strong downward press, amicably chiding his daughter in a good humoured voice for her impatience. “You have to put in less paper, you see? Like this.” He divided her stack into two and she continued punching holes until the paper was no more than a flimsy grid, then she would overload it again and the cycle would begin anew.  
Hiroshi Sato had been a very patient man once.

Asami stood beneath the Spirea Nipponica.  
Snowmound they called it.  
You might have seen them, great flowering bushes with reddish stalks springing straight out the ground, forking delicately into a fine mesh of twigs, laden with miniscule white flowerheads.  
The bushes stood neatly on row, showering their guest with perfect white petals that left the delicate twigs bare and eerie, but the ground beautiful and white.

It was late May and the falling snowmound petals almost made it seem like it really was snowing, they would turn brown later, but today the freshly fallen petals were crisp and white and so terribly beautiful to behold. Asami thought about sitting in her father’s office at age five, punching holes in papers.  
He’d asked why she did it, but she held back the answer.  
Then she showered him in fistfull after fistfull of holepunch confetti, it rained down on him in a wild flurry burrowing its way into half open drawers and settling between evenly spaced books without a care for when they would be removed or who would have to undertake such an infuriating task. Hiroshi was too shocked to do anything but laugh and far too indulgent to even think about being angry.  
They found them for weeks, years.  
Little white circles.  
Sometimes there was a full letter on one. Asami found that oddly satisfying, like a tiny bit of precision engineering accomplished without skill or intention but there all the same.

The snowmound petals were their identical natural counterpart, milky white and perfectly round. The letters Hiroshi wrote unto her life never graced them, they were untouched.  
Innocent of function and of memory. Their goals achieved by being beautiful alone.

They gathered in her inky hair and beneath the lapels of her red and black coat. 

There was a mound. 

A snowmound of pure white petals on the tombstone.

HIROSHI SATO - FATHER.

Asami had other words for him, but they were carved into her skin. Scars taking the place of letters, forming grievous words from when he tried to kill her and an agonizing lament where his sacrifice pumped through her veins like second life blood. 

Those actions where his true eulogy. 

HIROSHI SATO - FATHER/KILLER.

For now the legacy of Hiroshi the man, the monster, gave way to the legacy of Hiroshi the legend. The businessman, the inventor, widower. Father.

There was still time to decide if the other part of him should be buried and forgotten forever.  
Once the future had faded the hurt and it no longer read so easily.  
Once the confetti of his betrayal had been swept away and left only the tiniest trace in the cracks of her life, waiting to be found and reexamined.  
Ready to hurt once more but only for her.  
He had hurt so many yet whatever evil he had done felt wholly hers, it did not belong to anyone and neither did she wish to acknowledge that it might.  
With one hand he had written evil and with the other he had so carefully rewritten what he could good.

When Asami came home she found them, little white dots, snowmound petals.  
Free of letters but filled to the brim with memories.  
Hidden in every nook and cranny.  
And amongst the perfectly round petals was a single white dot with a pitch black L on it, like it had been stamped out yesterday not 20 years ago.  
Asami laid down on her bed, thinking about L words. Linger, Liability, Listen, Lunacy, Lament, Liberty. 

But mostly about those L words who express so vividly the circular nature of life.

Love. Lose. Live.

What else could there be?


End file.
